In recent years, more and more people have been using cloud computing systems, which will simply be referred to as clouds. This increase in the number of cloud users has brought about a new trend in which a plurality of organizations forms a single group and makes a comprehensive contract for clouds as the group. Namely, each organization in this group does not make an individual contract for a cloud. For example, a company group to which a plurality of companies belong could make a single contract with a cloud service provider. Making a comprehensive contract as a group offers benefits. For example, when a group of companies makes a comprehensive contract, they are able to receive a higher discount rate.
When a group of companies makes a comprehensive contract with a cloud service provider, the group of companies is collectively charged by the service provider for the comprehensive contract. In this case, for example, a department (a cloud contract management department) that manages billing and operations of the cloud contract of the group pays the charges for the clouds to the service provider. Next, the cloud contract management department calculates a charge billed to an individual organization using a cloud and bills each organization a corresponding charge.
To calculate the charges billed to a plurality of users for cloud services, various techniques have been considered. For example, there has been proposed a billing system capable of performing billing and a discount on the billing for each organization for users of services by application service providers (ASPs). In addition, there has been proposed an information processing device that allows a plurality of users to share the charges of services used by the users. In addition, there has been proposed a billing information generation device that easily calculates the charge of each of a plurality of users about the service charges billed to a representative user. See the following documents, for example.
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2006-155514
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2015-018361
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2017-016513
When a plurality of organizations that forms a group use clouds and are collectively charged for use of the clouds, it is appropriate to determine the charge to each organization based on the usage of the cloud by each organization. However, with the conventional techniques, an appropriate charge based on the usage for each organization of the group using the clouds is not calculated. This problem arises not only when clouds are used but also when a plurality of organizations shares the charge for use of services provided via a network.